Super-rich Annotation Assignment

Show me what you’ve learned about digital reading and annotation. However, instead of writing an essay or taking a test, you’re going to produce a super-richly annotated text. The purpose of your annotations is to guide the reader into a deeper, fuller understanding of your text. The purpose of the annotations is NOT to offer the reader one interpretation of the text. (Recall the Genius annotations of “Bartelby” and how so many of them seemed to prosecute an argument rather than encourage to us think more deeply or widely about the story.) Your super-richly annotated text will be due: noon, Tuesday, October 3.

To complete this assignment successfully, you’ll need to:

select a text to annotate and post as a page to your WordPress site. The text can be a short story or a poem or even an excerpt from a novel. It probably shouldn’t be too long or too short – – think about a range between Natalie Diaz’s poem and “Bartelby the Scrivener.” Make sure you text is well-formatted as a WordPress page, e.g. no big spaces between lines or weird font changes or etc. (10 pts.)

install and activate the Hypothesis plugin on your page. This can be located and installed through the “plugins” menu on your WordPress dashboard. (10 pts.)

add eight (8) annotations to your page, thusly:

– – keeping in mind the categories I proposed when we looked at the annotated versions of “Bartelby,” you should supply two (2) annotations for each of the following two categories: context (think of Kahn’s John Jacob Astor annotation on Bartleby); patterns (a good example of this might be Kahn’s annotation on Bartelby’s “fetal position” at the end of the story or his annotation of the narrator’s “No, not to-day, Turkey”) (20 pts);

– – supply four (4) annotations in the “ways of reading” category, e.g. look at Kahn’s annotation of “You will not?” or of the narrator’s “cadaverously gentlemanly nonchalance.” (50 pts.)

your annotations should take maximum advantage of the multimodal possibilities (linking, images, video, etc.) of the Hypothesis tool. (10 pts.)

your annotations should be free of grammatical, typographical, and spelling errors.

To produce rich annotations, you’ll have to do a little research on your text. You can use scholarly articles, book reviews, even Wikipedia. Much of this material can be located via the SFSU library databases or Google scholar. (Be sure to hyperlink to any reference material.)

There is no maximum or minimum length to annotations. It’s better to think about length in terms of quality. E.g. is the annotation rich enough to help the reader? Is the annotation so lengthy that it distracts the reader? (Again, think about our discussion of the Kahn and Genius annotations.)